I just want to check with you guys before filing this suggestion for additional feature.
I created a chart a while ago from a spreadsheet. I add data to the spreadsheet almost every day so eventually there will be thousands of rows to process. I have date on the X axis and SEK (Swedish currency, sing. "Krona", pl. "Kronor") on the Y axis. First I made a very big chart, covering all the 1024 columns and a few hundred rows. However this didn't work. It was very slow, and after several minutes it hadn't even started to draw the chart… So I made it a lot smaller, maybe 100 columns and 200 rows. This was still very slow but at least it worked. What i want to do, is to see the day by day details (which can't be seen if I make the chart too small) and still be able to see everything, from day one until today, by just scrolling the whole spreadsheet. So my idea was some kind of scrollable line chart. Of course this could be done in many different ways and the design options are probably several, but my idea is that when the mouse pointer points at the chart, it turns to a hand. Clicking the left mouse button and moving the pointer would then move the surface of the chart. The X and Y axises shouldn't move, however their values should change to the appropriate value, depending on the mouse pointer movement. Maybe the user should press Ctrl or Alt or something to make this happen, to avoid conflict with other chart features. This makes it possible to make big charts small. Then I could make a chart smaller than the screen and still be able to see detailed data that otherwise would require a chart, several screens wide. Or, in other words, I would like a chart that I can scroll inside, rather than having to scroll the spreadsheet itself. The reason that I write this is to see if I'm the only one who would like to see this feature. I so I guess I'd be better of searching for an alternative to OpenOffice.org rather than to annoy the developers with my ridiculous suggestions… So what do you think? Is this a good or bad idea? Or can it be done already? Thanks for listening J.R.
